Schiavo Case Casts Spotlight on Oregon Suicide Law

By Teresa Carson , Reuters, March 22, 2005

PORTLAND, Ore. (Reuters) - U.S. supporters of assisted suicide, who have scored their only legislative victory in Oregon, are bracing for an intensified legal fight with the Bush administration after it intervened in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case.

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a request by the parents of Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida woman, to reinstate the tube feeding their 41-year-old daughter. The parents appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.

The case has divided Schiavo's family and become a cause for the Christian right and anti-abortion activists.

Schiavo's feeding tube was removed on Friday under a state court order. But the case was pushed into federal court by extraordinary intervention from Congress, which interrupted its Easter recess to pass a special bill. President Bush cut short a Texas vacation to sign the law early on Monday.

"The real message of the Terri Schiavo case is very clear," said George Eighmey, executive director of Compassion in Dying of Oregon, a group that supports assisted suicide. He said he expected more challenges to assisted suicide legislation.

"I don't want a politician deciding my fate," Eighmey said, "The spotlight will shift to Oregon once again as Americans debate the issues surrounding the end of life."

Oregon's Death With Dignity law would not apply in the Schiavo case. The law requires that terminally ill patients must be conscious and competent to make the decision themselves and must ingest the lethal medication without assistance. To get a prescription, the patient must have less than six months to live. Two doctors have to agree to that prognosis.

Schiavo has been in what Florida courts have accepted as a "persistent vegetative state" since suffering a cardiac arrest that starved her brain of oxygen in 1990. Schiavo's husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, has been trying to have his wife's feeding tube removed, saying she would not have wanted to live hooked up to tubes. Her parents say she responds to them and could recover.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon who voted against the special legislation, said the language in the measure was "so broad and sweeping that it would call into question every living will and end-of-life directive."

FEDERAL LAWSUIT

Oregon's law is already being challenged by the Bush administration. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft filed suit against the assisted suicide law in 2001 and the lawsuit is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Oregon, the only state that permits physician-assisted suicide, passed the law twice and it took effect in late 1997. Since then, 208 Oregonians have hastened their deaths under the law, 37 of them in 2004, according to the Oregon Department of Human Services.

"Oregon has succeeded with assisted suicide because they ... haven't left the issue to litigation brought piecemeal by family and politicians," said Arthur LaFrance, a professor at Portland's Lewis and Clark School of Law.

In the neighboring state of California, lawmakers are pushing a similar law on assisted suicide through the state Legislature. Lawmakers in Vermont will begin debating assisted-suicide legislation this spring.

LaFrance said Congress' special legislation to move the Schiavo case to federal courts "will ultimately be held unconstitutional."

"They are tampering with the federal courts' jurisdiction and it is overreaching and discriminatory," LaFrance said.

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